Sustainable Procurement
Utah’s Sustainable Procurement Program
For the last two years, the State of Utah Division of Purchasing and General Services (Purchasing) has been developing a sustainable procurement program. This program development was initiated out of meeting the needs of the State’s contract users and other customers, and not out of the requirement of legislation.
In developing an appropriate Sustainable Procurement Program (SPP), State Purchasing has undertaken research to help establish state benchmarks, common best practices across both states and cities, and provide specifics about key factors for successful SPP implementation.
Sustainable Purchasing Summit
In March of 2022, the Coordinator of Resource Stewardship, in partnership with Purchasing, hosted the State of Utah’s first Sustainable Purchasing Summit as part of Purchasing’s Spring Procurement Education Partnership (PEP) with the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO).
Speakers at the first Sustainable Purchasing Summit included:
- Arizona State University
- Utah Representative Joel Briscoe
- Amazon Business
- Utah Sustainable Business Coalition (USBC)
- Utah Division of Facility Construction and Management (DFCM)
A total of 103 participants attended the Summit in-person and approximately 104 attended online through “Watch Parties” located in Davis County and St. George.
In March 2023 after receiving such positive attendance and feedback from the 2022 Summit, Purchasing hosted its second Sustainable Purchasing Summit.
Speakers included:
- Utah County Commissioner & Member of the Utah Cryptocurrency Task Force, Amelia Powers Gardner
- Weber State University
- University of Utah
- Utah State University
- University of Utah Health – Hospitals and Clinics
- Utah Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ)
- Utah Division of Facility Construction and Management (DFCM)
Attendees at these summits include city and county governments, state agencies, and other local non-profits. This allows for efficient dissemination of new procurement best practices and for procurement professionals to discuss their experiences of applying sustainable procurement. It also allows State Purchasing to gauge interest in sustainable procurement and develop strategies to mitigate challenges that some of our community partners and customers are experiencing in sustainable procurement implementation.
“Think Utah, Quote Local” Campaign
While there are many facets to the State of Utah’s Sustainable Purchasing Program (SPP), one of the most notable is Purchasing’s development of its new ‘Think Utah, Quote Local’ campaign. The campaign is designed to increase local business contracts with the state.
A branch of this new program is ‘Sustainable Utah’ which measures the positive environmental impact accrued by keeping business local. Customers can search local vendors to provide quotes for procurement. Search fields include county, zip code, or industry. By keeping procurement local, local air quality can be less impacted due to the decrease in emissions from less transportation being required to get the goods to the end user.
Amazon Sustainable Purchasing Dashboard
The State of Utah’s Sustainable Purchasing Program is currently in the phase of developing baseline data that can be used to measure success over time. One example of baseline development is the State of Utah Amazon Dashboard. Beginning in Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, Amazon Business implemented a Sustainable Purchasing dashboard for the State of Utah.
The dashboard allows Purchasing to drill down into the Amazon purchase data and filter out how many purchases were Climate Pledge Friendly©. Climate Pledge Friendly© highlights products that are certified by one of the sustainability certifications featured on Amazon’s certification page, or by Amazon’s own Compact by Design© certification. For fiscal year 2022 (FY22), 398, or 1% of purchases made, were Climate Pledge Friendly©.
Purchasing hopes to increase the number of Climate Pledge Friendly© purchases through education and outreach to users of the State of Utah Amazon Business account. Having a meaningful baseline will allow Purchasing to accurately measure success of its education efforts and ascertain which education messaging is most successful.
